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Raspberry Pi - Model B

Description: Who wants pi? The Raspberry Pi has made quite a splash since it was first announced. The credit-card sized computer is capable of many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. It can run several flavors of Linux and is being used to teach kids all over the world how to program… Oh yeah, and it does all that for under $50.

The secret sauce that makes this computer so small and powerful is the Broadcom BCM2835, a System-on-Chip that contains an ARM1176JZFS with floating point, running at 700MHz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode and is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute. What’s that all mean? It means that if you plug the Raspberry Pi into your HDTV, you could watch BluRay quality video, using H.264 at 40MBits/s.

But wait, there’s more. The Model B also has a 10/100 Ethernet port so you can surf the web (or serve web pages) from right there on the Pi. The system volume lives on an SD card, so it’s easy to prepare, run and debug several different operating systems on the same hardware. Most Linux distributions for the Pi will happily live on a 2GB SD card but larger cards are supported.

The Model B’s two built-in USB ports provide enough connectivity for a mouse and keyboard, but if you want to add more you can use a USB hub. It is recommended that you use a powered hub so as not to overtax the on-board voltage regulator. Powering the Raspberry Pi is easy, just plug any USB power supply into the micro-USB port. There’s no power button so the Pi will begin to boot as soon as power is applied, to turn it off simply remove power.

On top of all that, the low-level peripherals on the Pi make it great for hardware hacking. The 0.1" spaced GPIO header on the Pi gives you access to 8 GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI as well as 3.3 and 5V sources. Mating ribbon cables can be found in the related products below.

Next Sparkfun contest, find the real Raspberry Pi product page! Anywhere that has the Pi in for retail price is selling out quickly. Heck even one of your competitors made it an add in for orders over a certain dollar amount. I am just glad Sparkfun made the effort to carry it, I’ll get one next go round.

I withdraw the question.
It is here, arrived quickly, well packed.
I added a (sparkfun) 1A power supply, and a
4G Class 10 SD card that I prepared according
to the pi page, and it booted perfectly the first time.

Any OS on a pi has to work on the older ARM v6 architecture, witch most like Ubuntu don’t. Also a big fancy OS like OS X would be very very slow due to the low clock speed (700MHz) and low amount of RAM (512MB).

It’s not possible, since OS X is a closed OS. You would need its source-code in order to port to the RPi unit. (they did with the XBMC and other Linux distros) Now, maybe via an emulator, but it would be incredible slow, I guess?

EDIT: I think the idea is that they don’t want a bunch of resellers to steal all the stock and them sell it for markup. it’s like toys at xmas time, you see them for sale on eBay for a lot more money because the demand is there. by only selling in small quantity to customers, they can keep the retail price what it should be even when there’s high demand (which there clearly is)

Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what all is going on, but initially, they weren’t even entertaining distributors (beyond the one(s) they picked to initially distribute the product) and wouldn’t sell to us at ANY quantity. So, we’re lucky to have (had) 50.

Some interesting tid-bits from the wiki article, one distributor (of the two) took over 100,000 pre-orders in one day (which is why they went to the take-a-number and we will let you know when you can order process). In July they reported manufacturing 4,000 units per day. They have sold about 500,000 boards as of September. I got in line in May, ordered in August, received it two weeks ago. Working through the SparkFun tutorial now!

that’s partially not true–there is motivation, it’s just that production takes time, and there are LOTS of distributors that want to sell these. And they’re a non-profit organization. It also makes customers want the product more and more, and it actually helps sales of the product. More waiting time, more time talking about the product, more people buy the product

Chris is right, I got the same email, however I logged in immediately after receiving it and there were 902, and sold at an average of two per minute the first hour. Personally I’m still holding out for the Hackberry, but +1 to SF for stocking 900 units!

Lets face it, no one is coming anywhere near making enough of these things for reasons that are well beyond me.

There is no way the original sourcers are now unaware of demand and are unable to fulfill orders in less than six months time. Hell, you could build the factory in less time than it takes to source these things.

Might as well move on to something else.

I know these isn’t a Sparkfun issue, but the availability of the RPi is nothing less than absolutely stunningly pathetic across the board.

That’s a big part of it - the Pi is being sold at a price which is extremely close to the manufacturing cost. This makes it a great deal for the consumer, but it makes the business case for a reseller (like us) very difficult.

Business pricing is an interesting and sometimes counterintuitive problem. If we (or any company) can’t make enough money from each sale to cover the purchasing / inbound shipping / inventory / handling / marketing / etc. then selling more of them actually causes you to lose money faster.

Interesting….luckily, I was able to snag one and I love it. Thank god you guys aren’t amazon! For some reason, they think it’s ok to sell Pi’s at $65-$75 and think that’s ok! It’s not! SFE is truthfully amazing!

Amazon doesn’t set the price, they just skim a few bucks off the top of the actual seller price. The price today on Amazon is $47, with free shipping, so the effective cost is the same from Amazon or Sparkfun. The real difference is that Amazon has stock.

Actually I got here when there were 2 left, added one to the cart and by the time I was at the checkout, all gone! So just under 90 minutes from the RSS post in my reader to the time I got the out of stock message.

So now i have the pi, well my dad does, everything is installed, any way to use the GPIO headers to add a VGA output for a monitor, essentially another video output. I had a bunch of adapters to adapt HDMI to VGA, but the pi didn’t seem to work like that.

I just bought the Raspberry Pi, hooked it up, loaded Raspian from the NOOBS SD, rebooted and now I can’t login because the keyboard either sticks or repeats and it’s not the keyboard at fault. It’s the pi and they know the problem exists. It’s so bad I haven’t been able to login at all. Your selling a product with a KNOWN defect. Why???

It would be nice to have a few more things for the Pi since it IS sooo popular! It is just easier for a buyer to get everything they want in 1 stop and only have to pay shipping for 1 place instead of going to here and other places for what we need and paying double shipping..

I know that this is a total noob question but can a pi be made into a mini computer that will run nothing but a 3D printer, basically it will run the slicing software so I don’t have to keep my 3D printer hooked up & I won’t need to use SD cards, ‘cause that’s a hassle to me.

Manufacture of any electronic device is difficult to really designate a specific locale, but as far as the RPi foundation is concerned, some of the RPi’s are ‘manufactured’ in the UK. You can recognize them by checking the print next to the power jack - if it says “Made in the UK”, it should be assembled at the Pencoed, Wales plant.

The product images show such a board, but I’d imagine the actual board received may depend on the boards SFE receives when putting in the order. Mike’s mention above - “Reality may vary” - applies here as well :)

To clarify this a bit, we’ve got that many on order, but we won’t be getting them all at once the next time a shipment shows up (more’s the pity). I expect that we’ll continue getting ~500 at a time for the foreseeable future.

I didn’t think this through very clearly when I was putting together the display for incoming purchase quantities; we don’t have this data modeled in our system as well as we might. I’m working on a fix right now which should make things a bit more obvious.

We might experiment soon with allowing a fixed number of backorders for products like this one. As it stands, I think there’s just so much demand for the Pi that we’re trying to avoid having thousands more backorders than we’re able to fill in a year. That sort of thing turns into a lot of angry phone calls and e-mails after a while.

Stock notification - 5 in stock. all sold out in under 2 hours and the notification was fairly late evening. Considering that there is a supply problem with the RPi and I keep hearing that quality control on some boards is not the best I’m really wondering why beagle bone is not a better solution for most uses, especially considering that a faster much lower cost beagle bone with video and audio on board and more memory is on the way and compatible with existing capes. more info to be announced soon at design west.

The beagle black actually costs less when you compare the total cost of everything required to make either usable. The Beagle Black also is far more expandable with a much greater amount and variety of IO.

I just received my Raspberry Pi this evening (pre-ordered from a different company days before Sparkfun carried them) and learned a few things. I received a error at startup “Error 110” which deals with the SD card.

What I have learned since is that a cheap SD card will not always suffice. I ordered a suggested Dane-Elec brand SD card from the company I got my Pi from and regret it. I have never had any luck with Dane-Elec brand stuff.

This comment has started to sound ranty, so moral of the story is check SD card compatibility first. Also I recommend picking up the ribbon cable for the GPIO. I regret not.

It’s really nice to see how much attention the RPi is getting. I wonder if it owes some of its attention to the SparkMakerDuino community? Although it has a REALLY nice price-tag, I’m not convinced it’s only because of that; people are generally happy spending a bit of money on what they’re passionate about.

Back in 2004-2005 I started using the Stargate board ( http://platformx.sourceforge.net/ - Datasheet: http://platformx.sourceforge.net/Documents/manuals/6020-0049-02_A_Stargate.pdf ), which was a 400MHz ARM (Intel XScale) platform. I absolutely loved the Stargate and I still have one lying around. It had some/most of the same I/O capabilities as the RPi, excluding the audio and video stuff (which is not that useful for most robotics projects, anyway. Also, it’d be interesting to know how much of the RPi’s power-consumption is spent on the graphics and audio processing, even when a display is not connected) but it had a nifty serial-terminal instead. It retailed at $695.

This product died about two years later, because at the time there didn’t seem to be much interest in a board like that .. while now, the RPi is knocking people’s socks off!
The times they are a-changin'!

I think the main difference here is that the price of the Raspberry Pi is significantly less than the price of some of the older alternatives. You mention the kit costing almost $700 – and here are the Raspberry Pi for just under $40 – add the power supply and the SD card that are needed and you may have spent something like $70. At prices like that, many more can afford to experiment. Then they post on their blogs or on the forums about what they are doing for everyone else to read and be inspired by. That sort of thing grows exponentially.

So what Broadcom needs to do is just start making profit out of the chip by adding some cha ching and have the raspberry PI be $45 dollars and profit profit profit happy customers and happy manufacturers. Bada bing batta boom! These would be able to stay with a decent amount of stock because Broadcom would be making profit and then they would make them on a regular basis, not when they { just feel like it}

the raspberry pi is not manufactured by broadcom. I broadcom employee, however, did come up with the idea. his intentions were for these to go to classrooms, but hobbyists and other private consumers have gotten most of these before any school could see one.

The raspberry is nothing but the Broadcom chip + other simple chips. So it is indeed essentially manufactured by Broadcom. The claim that it is targeted for education etc. IMHO is just an eyewash to evaded taxes. If anyone wants to learn programming, this raspberry thing is one thing to stay away from. Programming is best learnt on a PC.

If anyone wants to learn programming, this raspberry thing is one thing to stay away from.

For what it’s worth, one of the other dudes who works on sparkfun.com and our in-house code has been using a couple of Raspberry Pis as his main desktop environment here for months.

A lot of my personal introduction to programming was TI-BASIC on calculators I was supposed to be using for 7th & 8th grade math homework. I also got a lot out of shell scripts on a couple of decrepit many-user AT&T Unix machines, Apple’s HyperCard, and a BASIC textbook written for people who were expected to be working on machines that probably didn’t even offer a display.

My theory is that programming is best learnt wherever you can learn programming. :)

Agreed, and I guess most people learn that way.
But when it comes to “labelling” something as “education platform”, I would prefer a Linux box which shows possibilities of a computer and not its limitations.

Not true, possibly a linux desktop but definitely not a PC as in a WINDOWS PC. You might get the basics but if you really want to do some ‘damage’ then Windows makes you jump through too many hoops to get to the low level. The RPi is good b/c you can learn what you call ‘PC’ programming, as well as embedded programming by interfacing w/ the gpios, connect your own hardware and create drivers for it all in one serving, not possible w/ a ‘PC’.

& It is not ‘manufactured’ by Broadcom, no more than Sean Connery created James Bond, he merely plays a role in the big picture.

So you’re saying that the iPhones are really manufactured by Qualcomm just because they use their chip? Great logic there. It wasn’t mean to be used to learn programming. This was meant as a way to put cheap computers in every classroom, even in unprivileged areas. Think computer-for-every-child kind of thing.

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5

Media Player Success (sort of)

I use NextPVR to record .TS videos to my desktop computer and have been watching them using WDTV-Live on ethernet. WDTV-Live FF-RW stumbles on large .TS files, so I wanted to try XBMC (Kodi) on Pi. It sort of works.

First off, KODI is beautiful and responsive. The PI happily took my wireless keyboard and trackpad. However, natively I can get it to play only AVI files and have learned that I need to purchase a MPEG-2 license for about $5.00 to play other file types. The FF-RW works on the AVI files until I really work it. You can do that on a more powerful computer, but that strain caused my PI to freeze. As a start-to-end player, I have no complaints, in fact, it’s pretty amazing.

I next installed Raspbian to use VLC, which has its own codecs. Aside from looking grainy and washed out, the .TS video loaded and froze at the initial frame. I had suspected that for my media I need a more powerful computer. But the PI came close and sure is a lot of fun!

The learning curve could be less steep for nontechies like me. In my experience, it takes a little chasing around to install software. I had to go one place to get a SD card formatter that would work, another place to get a proper image writer to get the programming onto the SD card, and another place to get the software I wanted to run. I’m still confused about exactly what an image is and how it must be written to a device, which took a couple hours to figure out. I could now write a tutorial that clearly outlines these steps, but I don’t have a place where it could be easily found by those like me who have little knowledge and worry about downloading software from unknown and untrusted sources. Perhaps in time, there will be a “go to” site that’s simple and complete to get the PI running in no time. Then again, it was intended to be a learning platform. For me, that mission was accomplished.

super secret idea!

instead of traveling with a laptop i could see right away how useful it would be simply to have something small and portable to bring with me when i travel. the hotel you arrive at already has an HDMI compatible tv/monitor, so i bring a cable for that. i’m already traveling with a smartphone, so the charging device works as a power supply. couple it with a wireless mouse/keyboard and a wifi dongle and you’re good to go. check email, surf the web a little, jot down your notes and other travel craziness, store images of receipts or whatever. i LOVE the look on the TSA’s face when i slap this credit-card sized “computer” all alone in the gray box. “what’s this?” that’s my computer. they’re more interested in the wireless keyboard, like a bunch of goons that they are. anyway, it’s a more simplified way to travel with a computer and IF the thing is lost, stolen or destroyed, i’m only out a little instead of a lot. i get to leave my laptop at home. thanks Sparkfun!

Should have got this thing sooner!

It would appear that this development board is a breeze to use and can replace a whole range of electronics i would have expected to use previously. I just installed a gaming emulator, no problems.
it seems powerful too. My greatest concern is that it has very difficult physical dimensions and port orientation. cases and electronics i buy need to be well designed. this particular board will be relegated to a role out of view. replaced with something fit for purpose.

Older model, but still exactly what I was looking for

With the release of the model B+ and the Pi 2, this model doesn’t get much love these days, but it’s still does everything I require of it, and for a great price. I’m currently using it to do ADS-B receiving using a $20 SDR dongle, and it’s working great.

Awesome

Super easy to get going and start interfacing with the outside world. Definitely recommend for anyone who wants to do various projects. It does not have an ADC so be sure you know the limits of the device or what you need to buy as an add-on.

Great Deal

Most features and power per dollar

I was looking for a project base and these had the most features and the best performance I could find for the money. And as much as I dream of someday moving my project to a custom PCB and moving to an fpga, I believe in the long run using the Rasberry Pi will become a permanent as I won’t have the scale to ever make it cost effective to change. You just get so much power for the money.

More potential than I have time to explore

As a 72 year young retired IT person I was attracted to the Pi after reading about it and curiosity drove my purchase. So far I’ve just tinkered with it and have it running on my home network and accessing the internet. The configuration was relatively simple and the thing just works.
I’m using http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html in an attempt to learn Python. I’m having some difficulty applying my knowledge of assembly language, COBOL, etc. to the state-of-the-art languages but I’m hopeful.
My end goal is to learn enough about it to encourage a couple of 11 year old “minds” to channel the time wasted on video games into something that could impact their future.

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